With Father’s Day around the corner comes the somber news that Tim Russert, the host of “Meet the Press” and the author of “Big Russ & Me,” an affectionate memoir about his relationship with his father, has died, at the age of fifty-eight. (His father, eighty-four, survives him.) In 2004, Nicholas Lemann wrote of Russert:

In the abstract, there is a line separating news and entertainment, and journalism and politics. In real life, in Russert’s field, one has to play both a character whom audiences want to invite into their homes and one who is deeply a part of the high-level business of Washington. To be voluble and bright but also an authority figure, to be morally aware but in the end practical, to subject power to the test without undermining it, to question assertively within a conventional frame—that’s the job description. Russert fulfills it better than anybody else.

—Ligaya Mishan

• An interactive version of the Beatnik Questionnaire, created by Gerard Malanga in 1960, is available online in conjunction with the exhibition “On the Road with the Beats.” Question No. 1: Do you live like there’s no tomorrow?

• Michael Agger, of Slate, ponders how we read online, apologizing for the occasional long paragraph and offering tips on how to make screentime easier on the eyes (“Avoid MySpace”).

• In Ireland, Poems in the Waiting Room aims to replace doctor’s office magazines with pamphlets of verse.

• The writer Denis Johnson channels Charles Dickens and Hugh Hefner in a serialized novel, “Nobody Move,” which will appear in installments in Playboy through October.

• Random House has created a new position: digital publisher.

• Nintendo’s computerized kitchen guide may render cookbooks obsolete.

• Sean Connery will unveil his memoir at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. The book is reported to include meditations on “sport, architecture and, of course, the Gothic tendency in Scots literature.”

One day last week, a friend of mine dropped a well-worn paperback in my lap that she said she’d found on the subway. A note was taped to its cover:

TAKE ME
AND
HAVE A READ

If you do not enjoy me,
please place this note back on me
and pass me on to the next subway station…
If you take me, let Have A Read know you appreciate the gesture :-)
Have_a_read@yahoo.com
www.have-a-read.blogspot.com

The book was Eldridge Cleaver’s controversial 1968 best-seller “Soul on Ice,” written while the author, who would later become the Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, was serving time on a rape conviction at Folsom Prison. “Ice” is a forcefully written memoir and meditation on race, and a monument to the radicalization of racial politics that marked the era. It seemed to me a timely find, as the fortieth anniversary of 1968 rolls along, and as discussions of race in America reënter the public discourse with Barack Obama’s Presidential bid. I thought that perhaps the people at Have a Read were motivated by political consciousness—but, upon visiting the site, I found that their only agenda is to provide commuters with something “to pass the time.” To that end, they urge New Yorkers to print out the note, tape it to a book, and abandon it to its fate. But fear not: you can trace your book’s journey on the Web site, where people are encouraged to send messages and photos of their discoveries.

Later in the week, I left “Ice” on an uptown 1, and, in keeping with the spirit of the venture, a copy of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” on a Brooklyn-bound F.—Macy Halford

Salman Rushdie has a history of strange cameos: in 2001, he played himself in “Bridget Jones’ Diary”; this spring, he surfaced in Helen Hunt’s “Then She Found Me” as an obstetrician, imposing white coat and all. Now he has turned up in the actress-turned-pop-star Scarlett Johannson’s début music video, “Falling Down,” from her first album, which is, in an equally improbable pairing, a collection of Tom Waits covers. The four-minute clip is a cinema-verité-style retelling of a typical day in a starlet’s life, with everything you might expect—makeup artists and mascara, photo shoots with frou-frou frocks, and the obligatory scenery pans taken from the back of a van—and something you might not, which is the appearance of Rushdie about three minutes in, shown murmuring sweet nothings in Scarlett’s ear and nuzzling her neck:

As if in a nod to the intellectual caché of such a cameo, this is the only moment in the video in which Scarlett dons glasses—and they’re thick wire-rimmed ones, at that! (For the record, Salman wears a casual light blue button-down and seems to be in a jovial mood.)—Amelia Lester

June 11th, 8 P.M., over sweating glasses of white wine in the crowded smoking nook of d.b.a’s gravel backyard, the poet (and self-described comedy nerd) Arda Collins had this to say about people who hate standup but like improv:

You have to like stand-up because stand-up and improv breathe the same air. It’s sort of like saying, “I love poetry, but I hate astrology and funny sneakers.” It doesn’t make sense!

Spoken like a true Sagittarius.—Jenna Krajeski

Is what the girls of “St. Trinian’s” would do. These drawings by the legendary British cartoonist Ronald Searle (a U.S. compilation was recently published by Overlook/Rookery) feature sadistic and wickedly demented boarding-school girls beating each other with their field hockey sticks (“But I only broke her leg, Miss”), swilling gin and scotch (“Oh my God, she’s put water with it again”), studying the dark arts of sorcery and divination (“Smashing–pass the bat’s blood”), gambling (“Hard cheese, Maisie–your horse wasn’t placed”), and causing general mayhem (“Hand up the girl who burnt down the East Wing last night”). As noted on Boing Boing, Searle’s satire was partly a sublimation of his experiences serving in a Japanese prison camp in 1942. “Searle does not really think of schoolgirls as murderous little horrors,” his first wife and publisher writes in the new volume’s introduction. “But unconsciously he was seeking to reduce horror into a comprehensible and somehow palatable form.” Also being skewered: the idea of the pure and innocent British schoolgirl, and the fear that all-female education would promote lesbianism and independent thinking. My favorite image from the book is above; my favorite quote from Searle is as follows:

A St. Trinian’s girl would be sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid, lacking morals of any sort and capable of any excess. She would also be well-spoken, even well-mannered and polite. Sardonic, witty and very amusing. She would be good company. In short: typically human and, despite everything, endearing.

—Andrea Walker

If you happen to find yourself this summer at a black-tie affair, eating macaroni and cheese out of a tiny carafe with a doll’s spoon, consider Gillian Reagan’s recent piece in the Observer about the rise of “ironic” food: gourmet pigs-in-blankets, tiny butter-lettuced B.L.T.s, or other kinds of childhood fare offered at trust-fund prices. (The old steak tartare, perhaps, just can’t hold its own against the elfin mini-burger.) Reagan’s discussion begins in Henri Bendel’s store on Fifth Avenue, where the Greenpoint baker Sarah Magid was serving homemade snack cakes imitating the store-bought: “People see it and say, ‘Oh my God, is that a Twinkie and it’s…organic?” Magid said. (Note to enthusiasts: “organic” does not mean “calorie-free.”) Of those peddled by the folks at Hostess, “sitting on the shelf and gathering dust,” Magid said, they’re “not meant for human consumption, if you break down what the ingredients are.”

Steve Ettlinger’s culinary-science study, “Twinkie, Deconstructed,” just gone paperback, has done exactly that. Ettlinger investigates, in order, every ingredient on the box, in an effort to explain to his kids where high-fructose corn syrup, for example, comes from. It’s not exactly a bedtime story. (“Red No. 40 and Yellow No. 5 are made from oil, some processed by European companies, some by domestic companies, but most likely from Chinese petroleum refined in the Yellow River Delta at the edge of the Yellow Sea,” he writes.) What would Magid think of her fellow Brooklyn bakers who’ve gone even further around the anti-organic bend, claiming to have invented the deep-fried Twinkie? (Moreover, how did it leapfrog from Bay Ridge to the Indiana State Fair?)

The deep-fried Twinkie has been unironically on the menu at the 40/40 Club, the Flower District night spot, since it opened, and today, the executive chef Juan Jara, who helped put it on the menu, said that it’s staying. “A lot of people actually ask for them,” he said, including Jay-Z, who owns the club. Five party platters (eighty-five dollars each) of deep-fried twinkies have been pre-ordered for tonight, to accompany watching the fourth game in the Lakers-Celtics N.B.A. finals. 40/40 plans to expand to Tokyo and Macau, prompting the question of whether Yellow No. 5, in the form of a deep-fried Twinkie, will be making its way back to its origins.—Lauren Porcaro

• The Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk stirs up controversy in his homeland by linking soccer and Turkish “nationalism, xenophobia and authoritarian thinking.”

• Zakhar Prilepin has won the Russian Natsbest (National Bestseller) prize for “Sin,” a collection of linked short stories and poems. Judges included the Olympic figure skater Aleksei Yagudin.

• The Literary Saloon reminds us that the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—which today went to “De Niro’s Game,” by Rawi Hage—is not, in fact, the world’s largest monetary writing prize. The purse of the Spanish Premio Planeta de Novela is six times as large, at six hundred thousand Euros.

• Indra Sinha, whose novel “Animal’s People” was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, has embarked on a hunger strike to protest the treatment of survivors of the 1984 industrial disaster at Bhopal.

• The science-fiction writer (and coiner of the term “cyberspace”) William Gibson confides, “I daydream about writing a Civil War novel.”

• The identity of the author of an unauthorized book about Madonna to be published in mid-July has been revealed: it is Christopher Ciccone, the star’s brother.

• The Economist pronounces China “the new Soviet Union” for crime writers.

In the spring issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, the poet and author Kwame Dawes reported on H.I.V./AIDS in Jamaica, where he grew up. In his introduction, the timeline between the first reported infection and the disease’s rampant development elapses in a flash, and what follows are portraits of those living with AIDS, a plight made both easier and harder with the advent of antiretroviral drugs that allow victims at least the appearance of health. Accompanying the essay, under the auspices of the Pulitzer Center, is a gorgeous Web site featuring, amid photographs, testimonials, and music, poems by Dawes that were inspired by his research, many of them devoted to the people he met. For Annesha Taylor, who was once the public face of H.I.V. in Jamaica (before she became pregnant out of wedlock and was seen by the government as no longer an appropriate spokewoman for safe sex), Dawes wrote “Unforgiveness”; Glendon Asphall, Taylor’s H.I.V.-positive former boyfriend, is the figure behind “News.” In “Hope’s Hospice,” Dawes describes John Marzouca, the hospice’s co-director, as “the plump / Palestinian man with his swaying / rural middle-class patois / this jovial servant.” On June 8th, Ted Genoways, the editor of the V.Q.R., posted some updates from Dawes and included the sad news that John Marzouca had died suddenly in a house fire. “Hope’s Hospice” ends:

The plump man brushes
the gleam of tears from his cheeks.
I think of the simple equations
of compassion; I think of songs,
the accordion, the strained
harmonies, the bodies of the dying
shuffling past, eyes still hoping;
the van waiting in the shade
to take me from all of this;
the long ride through rain and dark
to Kingston, to sleep and more sleep.

—Jenna Krajeski

We’ve been to London a few times, but the only scenery we remember with total clarity are the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and that horrible little room in the Tower of London where the princes were murdered. No surprise, then, that our entry in the “Tate to Tate” contest, inspired by the release of a new graphic novel of the same title, was a bust. The book, by Tommy Penton, is “an illustrated walk along London’s South Bank,” from the Tate Britain to the Tate Modern, that tells a story “Where’s Waldo”-style—characters reappear page after page in a boisterous cityscape. The online contest provides an empty frame from the book and bits of scenery—buildings, people, and, yes, pigeons—which you drag into an arrangement that is, ideally, both accurate and artistic. Ours, alas, was neither, so we asked a native Londoner to make the attempt. He said that it was quite fun, but that “you’d have to know the view very well (or cheat using photos) to get it right.” Entrants so far have paid little heed to getting it right. See the offering “tate2tate2,” which boasts a huge pile of pigeons surrounding what appears to be an outsized perfume bottle.—Macy Halford

• Encyclopedia Brittanica is phasing in a new Web site that will allow users to modify its content and create their own.

• Mick Jagger has prevailed in keeping many of Dylan Thomas’s poems from appearing in the forthcoming biopic “The Edge of Love.” Jagger owns the rights to much of the late Welsh poet’s work and is in the process of producing his own, competing film.

• Apparently children still like to read physical books, Jeff Bezos notwithstanding.

• Boing Boing points to an online PDF of a declassified 1944 O.S.S. manual on how to sabotage the workplace.

• Wyatt Mason posts a letter, never sent, from Philip Roth to the critic Diana Trilling, written in response to her less than rapturous review of Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

• Fisticuffs break out at a dinner party celebrating the publication of “Dinner Party Disasters: True Stories of Culinary Catastrophe.”

• The author Paulo Coelho invites readers to contribute video and music via MySpace for a film based on his novel “The Witch of Portobello.”

• Top-selling writers confess to performance anxiety.

• An eight-hundred-word “Harry Potter” prequel, by J. K. Rowling, sold for twenty-five thousand pounds (more than thirty pounds a word) at a charity auction to benefit English PEN and Dyslexia Action. A story by Tom Stoppard came in a distant second, at four thousand pounds.

Upon the death of the former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, John S. Zinsser, we pause to reconsider the concept of the abridged edition. It’s now considered something of a sacrilege to “crunch”—as Zinsser’s New York Times obituary puts it—the great books. (This may be why Reader’s Digest has renamed its collection Select Editions.) More modern practitioners of the art have taken it to an extreme: John Crace, in his Digested Read column in the Guardian, offers four-hundred-word versions of recent best-sellers, along with even further squashed blurbs (for the new James Bond: “The name is Bland. James Bland”), while Book-A-Minute Classics sums up the collected works of Virginia Woolf as:

Life is beautiful and tragic. Let’s put flowers in a vase.

Last fall, however, the British publisher Orion, going against the tide, launched a series of “compact editions,” promising “great books in half the time.” Adam Gopnik took a look, and pronounced himself not ill-disposed toward the results, with one caveat:

The Orion “Moby-Dick” is not defaced; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved. The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be.…cut out the self-indulgent stuff and present a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters—the “taut, spare, driving” narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers.…

When you come to the end of the compact “Moby-Dick” you don’t think, What a betrayal; you think, Nice job—what were the missing bits again? And when you go back to find them you remember why the book isn’t just a thrilling adventure with unforgettable characters but a great book. The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby.

—Ligaya Mishan

Because lately the only thing that seems to sell better than books about vampires is books about Jane Austen, Publishers Weekly reports that the writer Michael Thomas Ford has sold his novel about “an undead Jane Austen, frustrated by nearly 200 years of writer’s block and 116 rejections of an unpublished novel she finished just before turning into a vampire.” I have nothing to add to the brilliance of this idea.—Andrea Walker

A few days ago came the unfortunate confirmation that the M.T.A. will definitely be nixing its long-standing Poetry in Motion program in favor of a prose series called Train of Thought. In Poetry in Motion’s first incarnation, in 1992, the placards featured Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Lucille Clifton; they gradually grew in number and eclecticism. I was often delighted by adventurous choices: Vera Pavlova alongside Dylan Thomas; Ogden Nash sharing the wall with Thomas Hardy. Brett Lauer, of the Poetry Society of America (the organization, directed by the former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn, chose the poems), says of the impact of the works on passengers, “They remember where they were going when they first read a poem,” a pretty remarkable thing in the middle of the subway’s signature blend of chaos and monotony. I can relate. My first few weeks in New York, I rode the subway all day, exploring the city, going on job interviews, and memorizing the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”—which is perhaps not the best party trick, but it’s a pretty powerful thing to have on hand in your brain. The world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;” nor poetry any longer in the subway, sadly.—Jenna Krajeski

• According to the new book “Machiavelli’s Shadow,” by Paul Alexander, President Bush fired Karl Rove while at church.

• On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “A Bear Called Paddington,” the marmalade lover—technically an illegal immigrant, having originally stowed away on a ship from Lima—has been issued an official passport by the Peruvian Embassy in London.

• Roli Books apologizes for personal details included in a recently published biography of the late Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, but stands by the book’s political content.

• A three-inch-by-one-quarter-inch watercolor painting of Tom Lefroy, whose supposed romance with Jane Austen was the inspiration behind the book “Becoming Jane Austen” and the subsequent film adaptation, could fetch up to fifty thousand pounds at auction. The romance is said to have foundered on the gentleman’s lack of a fortune.

• Carl Campanile, of the New York Post, declares, “If bookworms decided the presidency, Barack Obama would beat John McCain handily,” based on the book sales of the two candidates.

• Children in Britain will receive two million free books this year through programs supported by the British government.

In the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, notes the drawbacks of physical books—you “get hand fatigue” if they’re really heavy (e.g., “The Man Without Qualities”) and your spouse might complain if you turn the pages too loudly—and the advantages of the Kindle:

1. Being able to easily look up words in the dictionary: “I find I don’t know what lots of words mean, and I used to guess because—am I really going to get up off of the sofa and go find a dictionary?”

2. Changing the font size: “a very simple thing that’s much appreciated.”

3. Wireless delivery of books in less than sixty seconds: “You don’t have the cognitive overhead of thinking about your monthly wireless bill. You don’t have to know who the wireless carrier is. We’re hiding all of that complexity.”

Freed of complexity and cognitive overhead (otherwise known as “thinking”), consumers can concentrate on fulfilling their destiny as “information snackers.” And while some among us may be nostalgic for the good old days of ink and paper, Bezos gently reminds naysayers that “what’s really important is not the container, it’s the narrative.” As he points out,

You’re not going to keep riding your horse to work just because you love your horse.

—Ligaya Mishan

The Great Buffalo Mozzarella Scare was only the start. Last week, a salmonella outbreak was linked to raw red tomatoes (plum or Roma)—further threatening, one imagines, the status of the caprese salad. Today, the A.P. reported that certain national restaurant chains and stores will stop selling and serving red tomatoes. (McDonald’s will keep cherry tomatoes in its salads, vegans nationwide will be relieved to learn.) While the nation grapples with obesity, it’s an unfortunate time for vegetables to host, in Linnaean terms, a kingdom-on-kingdom war. A recent book, “Food, Sex, and Salmonella: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick,” by David Waltner-Toews, may be able to help: the author is an epidemiologist and veterinarian, who last year brought us “The Chickens Fight Back,” about pandemic diseases. A video promoting the book, though, would do well to move more quickly past a sort of cheery, omnibus alarmism—can a reminder that your food may be contaminated still read as a friendly tip?—and get to what we can do about it in our own kitchens.—Lauren Porcaro

It’s a hot doctrine these days that the books you own are windows to your soul, but Sam Gosling blows the field of character-analysis-with-little-to-no-information wide open in “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.” According to him, not just your books but your clothing and your CDs, and where you toss your towels and your paper clips, and whether or not you’ve got a well-lit bedroom—all speak to your personality. This seems glaringly obvious. Gosling’s spin is that we can easily be fooled by someone’s decorative “propaganda.” His goal is to teach the reader how to—you guessed it—snoop intelligently in others’ personal spaces (“décor-decoding research”), and ferret out the ugly truth.

We don’t consider ourselves in need of tips on how to snoop on a first date (or a second one), having mastered the art all on our own, but one topic demanded our immediate attention: “Does your workspace tell your boss you deserve a promotion or does it permanently confine you to cubicle hell?,” a subtopic of which—the arrangement of books in the workspace—might very well hold the key to our future. However, after trying to untangle the implications of what Gosling had to say—that an eclectic collection speaks to openness, that people who put important books on top are trying to make an impression—we realized the futility. Nigh every cubicle here is overflowing with books, most of which are, of course, of the utmost importance.—Macy Halford

The British may have us beat in the women-in-government tally, but when it comes to female Poets Laureate it’s U.S.: 3, U.K.: 0. Now, centuries after the appointment of John Dryden as Britain’s first official Laureate, there’s a strong possibility of a crack in the glass ceiling. But the ladies aren’t coöperating. Carol Ann Duffy, considered a front runner, might be too controversial; she’s already been passed over once for the position, supposedly due to her “unconventional”—read: lesbian—life style. Fleur Adcock, another candidate, noted, “It’s terribly hard work for very little pay,” despite attempts by the present Laureate, Andrew Motion, and Tony Blair to up the salary, adding five thousand pounds a year to the customary “butt of sack.” And Ruth Padel has expressed concern about what would happen to the quality of her work should she become laureate, perhaps prompted by Wendy Cope’s less-than-glowing assessment of Motion as someone who “has been doing a very good job writing poems without making a fool of himself.” Cope, herself up for the office, has decried it as “ridiculous” and “archaic,” and declared,

I have never wanted to be poet laureate. I have nothing against the royal family but I wouldn’t want to be under pressure to write poems about them. I have some sympathy with Kipling’s view that a poet has no business becoming an employee of the state. And, anyway, I prefer a quiet life.

In other words, Thanks, but no thanks.—Jenna Krajeski

We get sent lots of guidebooks on writing—and organic farming, and how to do yoga with your dog, and how to build a an energy-efficient house out of recycled car parts in twelve easy steps. (I made up the last one, but yoga for dogs is real.) They mostly make their way to the bench, sooner rather than later. But for some reason I paused on Nancy Peacock’s “A Broom of One’s Own,” and read it on the train in one sitting (it’s not that short, but I’ve a long commute) and was glad I did. The reason: it’s not really a guide to writing at all, in the sense of giving tips and pointers, but a handbook to cultivating the proper mind-set for writing, which in Peacock’s view means living in a state of perpetual humility and wonder at the unhappiness of people who will always have more money than you. The book describes Peacock’s addiction to housecleaning as a way of supporting herself (“Cleaning houses was my vice. I was sure I was too smart for it, but I couldn’t find a way out that pleased me”) and talks about the benefits of such work for a writer: solitude, the ability to set one’s own hours, the strange people you meet who will want to sit in their kitchens while you work and tell you stories about the intimate details of their lives, all of which make good fodder for your novels. Plus, the book has a great epigraph about dust:

Until the Industrial Revolution, humanity accepted the cyclical nature of life. Nature’s tides of composition and decomposition turned the small into the big and the big back into the small. Common sense held that over time all beings would find their way to dust and that dust itself formed a barrier between the visible and the invisible that could not be negotiated by the living.